Travel Companies Improve Digital Travel Experiences by Adopting Customer Experience Management Solutions

London, UK - 13th September, 2007 – Tealeaf®, the leader in online Customer Experience Management (CEM), today announced a surge of customer wins in the travel industry, indicating a growing strategic emphasis on improving customer experiences within the expanding digital travel market. More than twenty travel providers and portals — such as Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), Aloha Airlines, Bourne Leisure, Continental Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Holidaybreak, hotels.com, Starwood, VEGAS.com, and TUI UK — are among the companies leveraging Tealeaf’s Customer Experience Management solutions to proactively identify, understand and eliminate online obstacles and ensure successful customer experiences.

According to an August 2007 report, “Humanising the Digital Travel Experience,” by Forrester Research, an independent research firm, 2007 online leisure travel sales in the US and Europe are expected to reach $142.2 billion and grow to $213.8 billion by 2010. Despite this success, the report finds that travel companies “digitally disappoint” travellers by not meeting their expectations, resulting in a series of “noticeable performance gaps,” with the ultimate result that “travellers’ satisfaction with most digital channels is, for the most part, tangibly inferior to using offline channels.”

“Tealeaf provides us with unparalleled insight into each customer’s online experience,” said John Keast, COO, VEGAS.com. “We are able to immediately gain visibility into any online issues, improve the overall usability and conversion of our websites, and make business decisions influenced directly by the customer point of view.”

Consumers are rapidly adopting online travel. In fact, “travellers who use the Internet – for any purpose – are the norm,” with 90 percent of American business travellers regularly going online and 83 percent of US leisure travellers going online at least once a month according to the Forrester report. Beyond that, “two-thirds or more of all travellers in North America view technology as something that helps make their lives easier – a benefit that extends to travel planning and purchase.” Yet, digital travel experiences still often fall short of meeting online consumers’ expectations, with the report stating that more than 199 million travellers are frustrated getting travel information online, for reasons including poor Web site navigation and lack of essential functionality.


“With the online travel market growing at such a rapid pace, this a very positive time for the market but it is more important than ever that companies recognise obstacles to their customers’ online success still exist, and are potentially very detrimental to their top line,” said Rebecca Ward, chairman & CEO, Tealeaf. “Our travel customers are not simply resting on general market momentum, they are truly committed to proactively delivering the best possible online user experience. We are proud to be a part of their business strategy by providing actionable insight into the dynamic online interactions of each user on their sites.”

Tealeaf was recently recognised as “an industry pioneer” and named “the unchallenged leader in customer behaviour analysis” by Forrester in “The Forrester Wave: Appliance-Based End-User Experience Monitoring,” Q2 2007 (June 2007). With Tealeaf, businesses are empowered to see how their website works through the eyes of the customer, instead of relying on the insufficiency of disparate data points in effort to interpret their experiences.

About Tealeaf
Tealeaf is the leading provider of online customer experience management solutions. Tealeaf’s CX family of solutions provides unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every user’s unique online interactions. This "360-degree view" of the online customer experience enables a clear and consistent understanding of the customer for Ebusiness, IT, customer service and legal and compliance executives and their organisations across a wide range of vertical industries including retail, banking, travel, insurance, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and transportation. Founded in 1999, Tealeaf is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is privately-held. For more information, visit www.tealeaf.com.

###

© Copyright 2007 TeaLeaf Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Tealeaf products and services mentioned herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks and service marks of TeaLeaf Technology, Inc. All other trademarks or service marks are the property of their respective holders and are hereby acknowledged.

Tealeaf Media Enquiries:
Shoshana Deutschkron
Tealeaf
shoshanad@Tealeaf.com
(415) 932-5009
Sarah-Anne Bray
Wildfire PR
sarah-anne@wildfirepr.co.uk + 44 (0) 208 339 4420